Tag Archives: My Net Diary

I’ve had a bit of feedback that getting this FIT FIX Diet Plan in dribs and drabs is a bit messy and you’d like to see it laid out in its entirety to get a clearer picture about what’s going on. Again, I reiterate that this is a diet I’ve devised for myself as an experiment and you really should check with someone who knows more about these things than me (like a doctor) before embarking on this program.

Here are the basic rules:

FIT FIX DIET RULES:

Sugar-free lollies ARE allowed!

1. Things you can’t eat: potato, rice, bread and products with more than 5% sugar content. (the sugar rule doesn’t apply to wine or the one day you are allowed chocolate!)

2. You must write down everything you eat and count calories. (sounds boring but I have an easy solution for this!)

3. You must exercise every day for a minimum of between 45 minutes and an hour. I am going to aim for spin classes four days a week, plus two lots of abdominal classes and two sessions of body toning or weights workouts. If you don’t go to a gym, you can ride a bike, run and do toning exercises at home.

4. You must weigh yourself every day.

5. You must have three alcohol-free days a week. I calculate my week starting on a Sunday.

6. You can have one day off the regime per week where you eat what you like and ditch the calorie counting.

THINGS YOU’LL NEED:

My Net Diary I-Phone App

1. Scales to weigh yourself.

2. Scales to weigh the food you eat.

3. An I-phone or device that can use the My Net Diary App. This is my secret weapon in the fight against flab. It means you can easily put in all your measurements and target weight and it will calculate how much you should safely eat per day in order to lose weight. Add in everything you eat to keep your calories quota in check!

WEEK ONE – FOOD PLAN

SUNDAY-TUESDAY – Start with a 3-day juice fast to put you in the right frame of mind for your new weight-loss mission. For more tips about juice fasting, see blogs dated from November 19th. ( http://jenniferhansen.com.au/?p=4566 )

So there you have it! Three weeks of a food plan completely mapped out for you. I haven’t specified weights for all the food servings, as you can be flexible – as long as you weigh your food and record the details in your I-Phone My Net Diary App and keep under your daily calorie limit, you’ll be fine.

Most days listed have a food requirement UNDER the calorie limit, which allows you to add in snacks or larger meals, depending on how hungry you are. And you can drink wine – as long as (again!) you stick to your calorie quota.

Sampling Shane Warne’s new ’99 Not Out’ exclusive beer!

There will be days when you sin. I do – often…

Take last night for instance. After a fabulous party at Club 23 at Crown, where I very much enjoyed not only trying a new beer cricket legend Shane Warne helped create himself, aptly titled 99 NOT OUT, (very nice, it is too!) but I also had a couple of wines…

Now, the biggest problem with alcohol is how much it sabotages your will-power. Hence why we NEED at least THREE alcohol-free days a week.

Evidence…

I thought I’d been reasonably well-behaved with my food intake yesterday. Even at the party, where there was a wonderful array of delicious finger-food, I was restrained – only having ONE item – a small peking duck pancake. But then I woke up this morning and found THIS on the kitchen sink along with the dirty dishes, yet to be tidied up…

Yep, I’d demolished what was left of the cookies and cream ice-cream. ALL GONE.

As I always say, you just have to pick yourself up and start all over again… At least my weight has stayed down below the 70kg mark – now on 68.2kg. So I do think the FIT FIX Diet Plan works. Especially if you actually stick to the rules… Let’s see if I can get to my goal weight of 64kg. I’ll keep plodding along and document how this goes just to keep me accountable. I know it’s hardly riveting stuff, but it’s working for me, so selfishly, I’ll stick to blogging about it too. I’ll add new recipes, confess my sins and answer any questions you might have. Stay tuned!

Life’s so busy I barely have time to write this FIT FIX Diet Plan update, which just reinforces to me how important it is to keep the food simple. This probably won’t work for those of you who want to go the ‘all natural, all organic’ route, but for me, it’s trying to balance the hectic with the healthy.

So yes, I do buy some processed foods and commercial brands as well as organic juices and fresh vegetables. It’s all a matter of combining the two, to provide the healthiest, fastest eating options.

Some of you may also find this a bit too basic and repetitive, but the less time you spend thinking about food the better.

DAY FOUR – reviewing Thursday

The outline of yesterday’s eating plan was detailed in the last blog, so let’s take a look at what happened after that report.

I always struggle when cooking, not to sample the ingredients, which again reminds me how important it is to WRITE EVERYTHING DOWN with this diet. Imagine how many more calories you’d consume if you ate half the cake mix when baking but didn’t count it as part of your food plan?

A bit of sampling went on last night while whipping up the Bolognaise sauce, but I made sure to write the bits down, which included a piece of carrot and five Kalamata olives. Not a problem, given I was under my calories quota.

But I did exceed my two glasses of wine… Well, red wine goes into the Bolognaise sauce so I HAD to have a glass while cooking. Which meant another glass during dinner and another later in the evening while watching TV. So I broke a rule, but I still got in under the calories quota and the bathroom scales reading didn’t skyrocket this morning. YAY!

As I said, it’s all pretty simple fare. And here’s a tip about the celery snack. It sounds pretty boring, but if you buy it in pre-prepared packs in the supermarket, it tastes MUCH fresher and crisper, making it far more enjoyable to eat. Plus it gives good crunch factor, which you need if eating a diet which focuses more on protein. Not much crunch in meat, hard-boiled eggs and yoghurts…

A WEIGHTY ISSUE

Time to own up to how much I weighed before starting the FIT FIX Diet Plan. Hmmm. Let’s put it in perspective and remember I’m 172cm tall (just under 5 foot 8). I’m not trying to make excuses it’s just that you might get a shock… About five years ago, my average weight was around 62 – 64kg.

On Monday morning, I weighed in at 71.4kg.

Then I started the 3-day JUICE CLEANSE.

By Thursday morning, I weighed in at 69.4. Which is to be expected, with such a drastic dietary change, and I know such a dramatic drop will not continue. After a day of eating ‘normal’ food, I went up slightly today.

Friday morning – 69.6kg

But still, that’s a drop of 1.8kg in five days, so it’s a great start. My ultimate goal is to get to 64kg.

PLANNING AHEAD

SATURDAY – Day off. Eat what you like!

Basil chilli tuna salad

SUNDAY Breakfast – 1 cup scrambled eggs and 2 rashes of bacon

Snack – celery or carrot

Lunch – Sirena chilli and basil tuna, lettuce and spring onion salad

Snack – Tamara berry yoghurt (small tub)

Dinner – Steak and broccoli

MONDAY – Juice Fast Day

LOOKING AHEAD

I’ve stuck to the diet plan for today and am planning another AFD. Tomorrow is Saturday – my day off! It will be interesting to see how the scales tip after that… I may still pop my food intake into the My Net Diary App, because I’m on a roll, and you may be curious to hear how I piggy I really was. I’m also giving myself permission to eat chocolate but right now, don’t even feel like it. We will see…

So now I’m into DAY THREE of my Juice Cleanse and I’ve stuck to it solidly. Here’s how yesterday panned out and what’s happening today:

DAY TWO

Day Two started off swimmingly, but my enthusiasm started to wane by late afternoon. It wasn’t that I was getting tired of juice – I was starting to feel rag-doll tired.

Pressed Juices at 25 Carpenter Street, Brighton

I really should have listened to the advice from the Pressed Juices staff who recommend taking it easy on the days you’re ‘cleansing’. I thought I was doing well skipping a spin class at the gym and going for a power walk instead, but in the afternoon, I had quite a bit of running around to do with appointments and errands in the city and Chadstone shopping centre, so by day’s end, I felt completely drained.

I still enjoyed the juices with a fantastic selection of flavours. My favourite was the Zest Juice in the afternoon made up of pineapple, ginger, mint and pear – yum.

Challenges included watching my daughter eat sushi at Chadstone from our favourite store and suddenly missing the action of ‘chewing’ myself. Then she baked some delicious smelling biscuits when we got home which was horribly tempting, but I stuck to my guns.

DAY THREE SO FAR…

You might think I’m a piker, but I’ve decided to eat a ‘proper’ meal tonight, cutting back my 3-day JUICE CLEANSE to two and three-quarter days. I can justify this quite admirably though. You see, I REALLY want to get back to the gym tomorrow morning and without a bit of protein in the tummy tonight, that just won’t be possible.

Plus we’re going to a family dinner tonight and how can you say NO to your Mum’s home-cooked roast??? I won’t have potatoes though. Or dessert. And maybe I’ll have to ditch the gravy as well. NOOoooo. I’ve changed my mind. I’m having gravy.

But I have stuck to the Juice Cleanse for all of today so far and I’m feeling fine. In fact, most of the time (apart from yesterday, late afternoon) you feel fabulous! For exercise, I put in a good forty minutes on the treadmill, walking at a fast pace, so I can tick my exercise box too.

Now it’s time to get down to the RULES of the diet I’m going to design for myself. Let’s call it the FIT FIX DIET for the sake of having a reference name.

FIT FIX DIET RULES:

1. Things you can’t eat: potato, rice, bread and products with more than 5% sugar content. (the sugar rule doesn’t apply to wine or the one day you are allowed chocolate!)

2. You must write down everything you eat and count calories. (sounds boring but I have an easy solution for this!)

3. You must exercise every day for a minimum of between 45 minutes and an hour. I am going to aim for spin classes four days a week, plus two lots of abdominal classes and two sessions of body toning or weights workouts. If you don’t go to a gym, you can ride a bike, run and do toning exercises at home.

4. You must weigh yourself every day.

5. You must have three alcohol-free days a week. I calculate my week starting on a Sunday.

6. You can have one day off the regime per week where you eat what you like and ditch the calorie counting.

THINGS YOU’LL NEED:

1. Scales to weigh yourself.

2. Scales to weigh the food you eat.

My Net Diary I-Phone App

3. An I-phone or device that can use the My Net Diary App. This is my secret weapon in the fight against flab!

It means you can easily put in all your measurements and target weight and it will calculate how much you should safely eat per day in order to lose weight.

Calculating calories made easy

You might think it sounds terribly boring to type in everything you eat, but the bonus here is that once you pop the food item into the system, the App will recall all the details and the information will come up automatically. Given I don’t vary my food intake THAT much, it isn’t too hard. And believe me, I’m no tech-genius, so if I can do it, you can!

I start with My Net Diary tomorrow and eating a regime of more regular food. Which I’ll detail in a food plan later.

The other aspect of this App I love is that by storing your weight every day, it produces a little chart to show how you’re progressing. It’s great when you finally see the line on the graph start to head south!